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Scrabulous Is Dead, Hasbro's Version Brain-Dead
eldavojohn writes "Sometime this morning, Facebook shut down Scrabulous to American and Canadian users. Scrabulous, we hardly knew ye." This is sadly unsurprising, now that Hasbro's finally taken legal action against the developers, after quite a few months of letting it go unmolested. Seems like they waited until there was an official Scrabble client available (also on Facebook), while the snappy and fuller-featured Scrabulous kept people interested in a 60-year-old board game. The official client, which is at least labeled a beta, is a disappointment. This is not a Google-style beta release, note: it's slow to load, confusing, and doesn't even offer the SOWPODS word list as an option, only the Tournament Word List and a list based on the Merriam-Webster dictionary. (Too bad that SOWPODS is the word list used in most of the world's English-speaking countries.) It also took several minutes to open a game, rather than the few seconds (at most) that Scrabulous took — it's pretty impressive, but not in a good way, that the programmers could extract that sort of performance from the combination of Facebook's servers and my dual-core, 2GHz+ laptop. The new Scrabble client has doodads like 3D flipping-tile animations, too, but no clear way to actually initiate the sample game that jamie and I have attempted to start. I hope that once we get past that obvious hurdle, we'll find there's a chat interface and game notebook as in Scrabulous, but my hopes are low.
The developers asked too much money? Hasbro was too stingy? Hope they realize their mistake now and offer a decent price to the brothers who developed scrablous.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The Boggle clone changed its name, and its still up. There have been perfectly legal scrabble clone games published since the 1940s. I have some in my collection of antique toys and games. All you have to do is not use the trademarked name.
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If the people behind Scrabulous have any pride, they'll tell Hasbro to go fuck themselves. They did a better Scrabble than Scrabble, and rather than compete, Hasbro turned to the law.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
The Web-based version of Scrabulous seems to be working just fine.
We really REALLY need copyright reform. I'm 56 years old. Nothing ever created in my lifetime will reach the public domain while I still breathe, and no matter how young you are nothing created in your lifetime will reach the public domain either. And as this Scabble thing shows, it stifles creativity. When Newton said "if I see farther than other men, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" (and he wasn't the first to say that), the same could be said of art.
Where would engineering be if patents were endless, like copyrights are? Endless copyrights stifle creativity. Where would Disney be without the Brothers Grimm? And how can we convince our governments that they are hindering artistic progress?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I doubt the creators of Scrabulous had the foresight to patent their invention of "method to play the board game Scrabble using information technology," but if they did, they would have an awesome countersuit. Would the courts rule in favor of trademark or patent?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
http://games.yahoo.com/lt
(you need a yahoo login)
totally free. huge regular user base in all skill levels. you get to keep track of your score/ rank over many thousands of games. there are different servers for different skill levels
its a java app. i've had problems with it freezing on ie (so you lose a match and it hurts your overall standing), but it works fine in firefox. you can play time limit games, challenge spelling games, etc.
there are some quirks and minor complaints, griping about the dictionary of course being the biggest, as usual, but by and large i'm very satisfied by the player population and the overall challenge and the easy in/ easy out/ waste 20 minutes nature of play
you frequently encounter players with thousands of games under their belt, and you can check if their win/ loss ratio is suspect or their abandoned games count is suspect (meaning: they jettisoned games in the first few seconds before it hurt their score if they don't like their initial tiles, which is really lame). as for the players with the weird win/loss ratios: i don't understand why someone would cheat at such a frivolous nonmonetary past time, but you encounter such players way more than you would think. i don't get it. is someone designing bots for a CS class? is someone so interested in winning over enjoying themselves? i don't understand it
of course, it's not 100% scrabble, but how it departs from scrabble, such as pseudorandom letter tiles (chosen at the beginning of the game and fixed but from a much larger pool of tiles) is interesting. so some games are brutal because of a bunch of Cs, Is, and Us, and the next game might be surprising because of a surfeit of Js and Zs
i'm very happy with literati for wasting 20 minutes here and there
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is a Trademark issue, not a copying issue. GE profits on a name that is ancient, so does AT&T. Scrabulous is just too close to Scrabble as far as a brand name goes.
I don't see a single article on the front page that affects everyone.
Your post strikes me as a lame excuse for trumpeting your awesome coolness for not using Facebook or Myspace. Consider your awesome coolness recognized, now leave us alone to talk about things that affect many thousands of people.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
If these guys can do Scrabble so well, why not encourage them to do other Hasbro games in a way that makes Hasbro money?
Stop making sense.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Chessulous? Pokulous?
Pikachulous! I choose you!!
I haven't seen slashdot.org load as "Slashdot: social networking site reviews for nerds", which is what this article would be better classified as.
That's bull. This has exactly zero to do with Facebook, if you pay attention. This is about a cool game getting shut down by an overzealous trademark holder... in other words, exactly sort of thing /. likes to discuss.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
HIV. It's about as active as scrabble and gets just about as much attention from the general populace. A ton of people have it but nobody really talks about it anymore.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Yes, well that's because the Trademark still has value. Why should the Scrabulous guys leech off the marketing millions that Hasbro pumped in over the years. If Scrabulous was good enough on its own terms to succeed without trademark leeching, they should have just called it something else: they would have succeeded irrespective.
The bit I haven't yet deciphered (I have RTFA, but it didn't really help) is what exactly the lawsuit claims. It says that it's filed under the DMCA, but not what exactly Hasbro are claiming copyright on. Is a game concept copyrightable? If not, can Scrabulous just remove whatever little bit it is that they are claiming on?
They're not claiming copyright on anything if I understand correctly.
They're claiming trademark infringement. It's likely that if Scrabulous changed its name and perhaps trivially tweaked the gameplay, Hasbro would just bugger off. There are plenty of knock-offs of popular games, they're just renamed and re-themed.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Most of Hasbro's board is so old they probably have to have oxygen tents built into the boardroom.
That made me laugh out loud.
And it's so true. Hasbro is living in the 1980s, still trying to make money off GIJoe and My Little Pony.
They don't have enough tiles to make the word "innovate."
The Scrabble IP isn't owned by Hasbro -- they use it under license from a Mattel subsidiary that owns it. They are probably contractually obligated to 'zealously defend' that IP.
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We have quite a few board games in our house. We also have video games. They are both fun in their own respects. The nice thing about board games is so little development costs. They created over 60 years ago, and are still selling it for $15 for the basic, and $45 for the deluxe version (prices from Amazon). It is risky starting out, but once you have something popular it's easy to put out the same product year after year and rake in the money.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
board games are still quite relevant.
Every Friday I get together with a half dozen or so friends and we play card games board games or whatever. If you're playing with more than one other person the fun level of video games drops dramatically since a majority of the players become spectators. Most video games these days don't even offer very good multiplayer modes unless you're playing online, which is useless for local play. There are obvious exceptions but rock band and wii sports don't offer very high levels of intellect, where many board games do.
The most common game played on "Game night" is Killer Bunnies, not a "board game" exactly, but the same spirit.
Collector's Edition
Hasbro seems to be rejecting the idea that anyone would want to just play the damn game. Clearly people would rather see 3d tiles float around than be able to place them quickly and easily in order to enjoy the game itself.
Bottles.
It is.
Xerox? Generic name for any photocopier. Kleenex? Generic name for any paper handkerchief. Aspirin? Generic name for any painkiller with acetylsalicylic acid as its active ingredient.
Scrabble? Um, highly specific name for a single board game made exclusively by two companies. The average person wouldn't refer to any other board game as "a scrabble", even if it involved making words with tiles.
I don't understand why the Scrabulous folks took an approach that virtually guaranteed that they would be shut down. The rules of the game are not subject to copyright or any other restriction, so anybody can make a Scrabble-like game. The name itself is trade-marked, and the board artwork is copyrighted. That means that all you have to do to be free of IP restrictions is use a clearly distinct name and different artwork. It would not have been difficult to avoid legal problems. Why they didn't is beyond me.